The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

A LANDMARK SHORT STORY COLLECTION: More than 100 short stories by 51 different 19th-century writers redefine the great American literary form

Incudes both literary masterpieces—including classic stories by Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and Wharton—and new rediscoveries

As much a nineteenth-century American invention as baseball, the cotton gin, and the steamboat, the short story emerged here with a range of innovation and a variety of styles and subjects that has still not been fully appreciated. Diverse, wide-ranging, and unprecedented in its scope, this new two-volume collection gathers more than 100 stories by 51 different writers to track the development of the American short story from Charles Brockden Brown’s fragments and Washington Irving’s sketches to Poe’s gothic tales of horror to Mark Twain’s humorous stories to the Gilded Age masterpieces of Henry James and Edith Wharton. 

Among the many unexpected writers in collection are: the antebellum Black writer and physician James McCune Smith, whose sketches in his “Heads of the Colored People” series lampooned the pseudoscientific racism of phrenology ; Lucretia Hale, the author of the feminist fantasy “The Queen of the Red Chessman,” perhaps the greatest one-hit wonder of the mid-nineteenth century; and Fitz-James O’Brien, the author of such unnerving horror stories as “The Lost Room” and “What Was It?,” whose true themes and concerns twenty-first century readers, accustomed to reading gay fiction, will not miss.

From gothic horror to frontier folk tales, dark mysteries and interior pyschological dramas, this unprecedented two-volume story anthology captures a world of literary expression and experimentation that will surprise and delight.